Employee attitudes and (Digital) collaboration data: a preliminary analysis in the HRM field

The digital transformation of organizations is making workplace collaboration more and more powerful and work always "observable"; however, the informational and managerial potential of the generated data is still largely unutilized in Human Resource Management (HRM). Our research, conducted in collaboration with business engineers and economists, aims at exploring the relationship between digital work behaviors and employee attitudes. This paper is a work-in-progress contribution that presents a preliminary phase of data analysis we performed on a collection of Enterprise Collaboration Software (ECS) data. In the exploratory data analysis step, we analyze data in their original table format and elaborate it according to the user who performed the action and the performed action. Then, we move to a graph representation in order to make explicit the interaction between users and the objects of their actions. Finally, we introduce the concept of employee-attitude-oriented pattern as a mean to derive significant views over the overall graph and discuss Social Network Analysis (SNA) approaches that can be exploited for our purposes

Performance Appraisal and Innovative Behavior in the Digital Era

In digital competitive environments, organizations\u2019 ability to innovate is more than ever the key to competitive advantage. One way to cope with this increased pressure for innovation is to capitalize on employees\u2019 ability to generate new ideas and use these as building blocks for new and better products, services, and work processes. Individual innovation thus emerges as a key competence required from workers, in turn crucially affecting the way managers make employees contribute to organizational goals and assess their performance. This study draws on the process-based approach to HRM (Bowen and Ostroff, 2004) suggesting that HRM practices may have a signaling effect, to address the following research question: which specific characteristics of performance appraisal are more likely to be perceived as promoting individual innovation at work? To address this issue, we carried out a survey on 865 employees working in large, multinational firms operating in digitalized sectors or industries with the potential to become digitalized. We collected data on the main characteristics of the performance appraisal systems adopted by the firm where respondents work, as perceived by employees themselves. We gathered also data on the respondents\u2019 overall perception that performance appraisal boosts innovative work behavior. Then, we employed logit analysis to test the relationship between data on performance appraisal systems and data on the effectiveness of performance appraisal as a booster of innovative work behavior. Our results reveal that, as compared to informal feedback, formal performance appraisal is more likely to reduce the perception that performance appraisal promotes individual innovation and creativity at work. In addition, we found that in the employees\u2019 perception performance appraisal focused on the achievement of pre-set, quantitative outcomes is more likely to affect positively innovative work behavior than appraisal focused on pre-defined skills that employees exhibited performing their work. However, performance assessment focused on the new competences developed by the employees has a perceived positive impact even stronger than result-oriented appraisal. Taken together, these results contribute to advance our understanding of how organizations should evaluate employees in the digitalization era

Creating a Stir: The role of Word of Mouth in Reputation Management in the Context of Festivals

This qualitative case study examines the role of word of mouth (WOM) in reputation management in the context of networked festival productions. Particularly, it explores the ways in which WOM marketing (WOMM) is employed in festival marketing and brand-building. The paper links reputation and WOM to the concept of cultural branding with the aim of providing a framework for analysing how a festival's reputation shapes the creation of a culturally meaningful message. The empirical analysis is based on a multiple-case study involving three Finnish festivals hosted in the city of Pori: the Porispere Festival, the International Pori Jazz Festival and the International Lain�uojattomat Theatre Festival. The cases represent festivals of different sizes and varying organisational structure, content and life cycle. The findings indicate that the meaning and use of WOMM vary depending on key constitutive differences that affect the nature of the festivals? reputation and brand-building processes. Although the importance of external and internal stakeholders in these processes is evident, it seems that when the power of networks is recognised as crucial for festivals, WOM has a leveraging role in reputation management and brand-building. In these processes, the value of the festival leader's persona becomes crucial

Dancing in the digitalization: a case study on the sociomaterial platformization of creative organizations

Over the last years, basically due to the Covid pandemic and the related acceleration of digitalization of creative processes, cultural organizations have moved to digital platforms from their traditional physical premises. This shift has modified not only the fruition of cultural services by audiences, but also the production of creative content and the organization of artistic work. To explore these issues in an empirical setting, we adopt the theoretical framework of sociomateriality and carry out a qualitative case study on the screendance “1 Meter CLOSER”, performed during the 2020 lockdown by the Italian contemporary dance company, Fondazione Nazionale della Danza Aterballetto. Our findings reveal sociomaterial relationships between three aggregated dimensions (i.e., means of production, practice sites, organizational culture), suggesting that the platformization of performances gave performing arts organizations the opportunity to renew reciprocal adaptation between humans, sites/sights of production and digital means, also contributing to revitalize organizational purpose and identity

The leadership dance in a performing arts organization

The leadership structure of cultural organizations has been a central issue in cultural management studies for many years. However, extant research tends to characterize leadership structure either as unitary or dual, employing a static approach that fails to explain the process underlying its evolution when the cultural organization changes and develops. Drawing on these limitations, we aim to answer the following research question: how do leadership forms change over time in cultural organizations? We use a qualitative methodology based on an exploratory case study carried out between 2011 and 2018 on the Italian performing arts organization \u201cFondazione Nazionale della Danza Aterballetto\u201d. Our findings show that different plural leadership forms may emerge during an organizational change. In addition, we show how various factors and dynamics at multiple levels (individual, organizational and environmental) come into play. Our study suggests that companies aimed at establishing a stable leadership structure should consider not only their internal strategic demands and organizational conditions but also external factors. In addition, our study demonstrates that both informal and formal rules influence leader\u2019s expected behaviors

HR Analytics in the Digital Workplace: Exploring the Relationship between Attitudes and Tracked Work Behaviors

The increasing use of digital technologies in organizational contexts, like collaborative social platforms, has not only changed the way people work but also provided organizations with new and wide ranges of data sources that could be analyzed to enhance organizational- and individual-level outcomes, especially when integrated with more traditional tools. In this study, we explore the relationship between data flows generated by employees on companies’ digital environments and employees’ attitudes measured through surveys. In a sample of 107 employees, we collected data on the number and types of actions performed on the company’s digital collaborative platform over a two-year period and the level of organizational embeddedness (fit, sacrifice, and links dimensions) through two rounds of surveys over the same period. The correlation of the quantity and quality of digital actions with the variation of organizational embeddedness over the same period shows that workers who engaged in more activities on the digital platform also experienced an increase in their level of organizational embeddedness mainly in the fit dimension. In addition, the higher the positive variation of fit, the more employees performed both active and passive digital actions. Finally, the higher the variation of organizational embeddedness, the more employees performed networking digital behaviors